What are examples of historical revisionism that you hate the most?

[Xirik]

that New Jersey only won because of the trap and boring defense first style play.

in 1994 which team scored the most goals in the eastern conference? Devils

in 2000 which team scored the most goals in the entire league? Devils

 

[miscs75]

The Barry Trotz coached Islanders teams only played the trap and couldn’t compete with the top teams of the league.

 

[Aladyyn]

Recent one but the narrative that Kane was the driving force behind the Hawks Cups

 

[kingsholygrail]

The 80s were bad hockey because of the high scoring but the high scoring now is because it's good hockey.

 

[Terry Yake]

that goaltenders in the 80s were all terrible

 

[LightningStorm]

With Crosby's defense, I think it gets overrated because people equate tilting the ice, which he is great at, with being great defensively. They're related but not the same thing.

In a recent Forsberg/Malkin poll, this post aptly describes Forsberg as the fish your grandpa caught 20 years ago that gets bigger with each retelling.

Related to Forsberg, I've always hated the revisionism that without the additional pieces the Nords/Avs got in the Lindros/Forsberg trade, they don't have the assets to subsequently trade for Roy, Bourque, and Blake. If you actually look at those 3 trades, they were not contingent on the Lindros trade occurring. The idea that the Avs needed that trade for their 2 Stanley Cups is highly overblown and sensationalized.

"Yzerman didn't win until he learned to sacrifice offense for defense."

Yeah. Or:
1) he got older and his offense naturally declined
2) he got older and his defense/#leadership natrually got better with experience
3) he went from playing with below average talent to teams stacked with HoF'ers

Agree 100%. The irony is this narrative actually hurts Yzerman in his all time ranking because this has led to people thinking he was at his best in his 30's, in which case he does stand out less. To give an example, I rank Yzerman one spot ahead of Sakic among centers, based mostly on his late 80's/early 90's peak. But if you think Yzerman was at his best during the Wings/Avs rivalry years (when Sakic peaked) rather than before that, then Sakic was better and it's not close.

 

[BLNY]

"Yzerman didn't win until he learned to sacrifice offense for defense."

Yeah. Or:
1) he got older and his offense naturally declined
2) he got older and his defense/#leadership natrually got better with experience
3) he went from playing with below average talent to teams stacked with HoF'ers

It's not historical revisionism.

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[jgatie]

"Brad Marchand didn't get a penalty for punching Sedin". He got a two minute roughing minor and a 10 minute misconduct.

"Sedin didn't punch him back because he wanted the powerplay". It was 1:30 left in a 5-2 blowout. The 80s Oilers weren't coming back to win that game, never mind a PP that was being outscored by the Bruins penalty kill.

 

[Stephen]

Mats Sundin being lionized as elite and generational.

"Generational" was a hype term invented for Crosby and Ovechkin around 2005 and retroactively applied to Gretzky, Lemieux, Orr, Howe, etc. to denote some special once in a lifetime type of talent, with a hazy concept of what a generation actually entails.

No one ever applied that generational tag to Mats Sundin in his time, nor after it. I'd suggest your entire post is the definition of revisionism.

 

[jgatie]

"Generational" was a hype term invented for Crosby and Ovechkin around 2005 and retroactively applied to Gretzky, Lemieux, Orr, Howe, etc. to denote some special once in a lifetime type of talent, with a hazy concept of what a generation actually entails.

No one ever applied that generational tag to Mats Sundin in his time, nor after it. I'd suggest your entire post is the definition of revisionism.

He never won a major award or scoring title, and the Leafs put up a frigging statue of him. If you don't think that was way overhyping of his talent, I don't know what is.

 

[Stephen]

He never won a major award or scoring title, and the Leafs put up a frigging statue of him. If you don't think that was way overhyping of his talent, I don't know what is.

How any franchise chooses to honour and celebrate past players doesn't really need justification, especially to busy body non fans.

 

[Thallis]

"Vegas was gifted a Stanley Cup team"

Their first season was "is this the worst team ever?" & "They're going to be bad, the question is how bad" to "Vegas is on a hot start, when will they cool off" & "They'll still miss the playoffs" to "The rules were rigged for them to compete from the start"

 

[The90]

When people say that Montreal only won their cups because the had exclusive access to every French player in the league

It wasn’t exclusive, but they were well ahead of the game recruiting. They sponsored many teams and created a pipeline for development well before it was popular. It was genius at the time. Can’t hate them for it.

My contribution:

After playoff runs where a goalie plays well above their heads and the fans devote an entire summer screaming about ‘shut down defence, playing the right way, etc’, without mentioning save percentage as the biggest difference.

 

[jgatie]

How any franchise chooses to honour and celebrate past players doesn't really need justification, especially to busy body non fans.

I guess they have to cling to something.

 

[Peat]

This was the first thing i thought of when i read the title.

They constantly say the difference was that Crosby was a good defensive player and McDavid is all offense defensive liability, but McDavid has extremely similar defensive numbers+way more takeaways than Crosby did at the same age despite playing in a worse team.

I think takeaways are way overrated as a defensive stat.

Reason one is it's such a small part of the picture.
Reason two is it's a very poorly counted and quantified stat, so not hugely accurate.
Reason three is it is a stat where it's easy to get big numbers through risky, defensively bad plays, where players abandon the defensive structure to go fishing and leave a big hole if they miss...

... which probably accounts for why there's a number of defensively suspect players who get huge amounts of takeaways. Evgeni Malkin is second for 5v5 takeaways p/60 over the last three seasons, and nobody's ever going to say Malkin plays good defence. Erik Karlsson is in a similar boat.

"Vegas was gifted a Stanley Cup team"

Their first season was "is this the worst team ever?" & "They're going to be bad, the question is how bad" to "Vegas is on a hot start, when will they cool off" & "They'll still miss the playoffs" to "The rules were rigged for them to compete from the start"

Just because everyone is convinced a choice was bad on the day it was made doesn't mean everyone was correct. It just means people thought that, that's all. People are wrong en masse all the time.

It makes more sense to judge Vegas were gifted a Stanley Cup team on the results than people's opinions the very next day, and the results obviously tell a really different story.

 

[Garbageyuk]

So, for me it’s probably that Crosby was somehow well above average or even good defensively in his early-mid 20s. Yes, now he’s somewhat capable of decent two-way performance (but not like the top 10 in the Selke voting), but it wasn’t true in his prime

Agreed he was never good defensively. Where I disagree is that he’s anywhere near good now or the last few years. He’s average/neutral at best. Any forward with any kind of positive impact defensively isn’t going to be sporting a >70 OZs%.

 

[OKR]

I think takeaways are way overrated as a defensive stat.

Reason one is it's such a small part of the picture.
Reason two is it's a very poorly counted and quantified stat, so not hugely accurate.
Reason three is it is a stat where it's easy to get big numbers through risky, defensively bad plays, where players abandon the defensive structure to go fishing and leave a big hole if they miss...

... which probably accounts for why there's a number of defensively suspect players who get huge amounts of takeaways. Evgeni Malkin is second for 5v5 takeaways p/60 over the last three seasons, and nobody's ever going to say Malkin plays good defence. Erik Karlsson is in a similar boat.

Takeaways alone don’t mean much, but when two players share basically identical defensive numbers but one also has way more takeaways, how is he considered the worse defensive player?

 

[LaCarriere]

"Vegas was gifted a Stanley Cup team"

Their first season was "is this the worst team ever?" & "They're going to be bad, the question is how bad" to "Vegas is on a hot start, when will they cool off" & "They'll still miss the playoffs" to "The rules were rigged for them to compete from the start"

I mean, the rules allowed them to draft a team of 2nd/3rd liners, and second pairing (3/4) defenseman.

Never has the expansion draft allowed teams to protect so few players. The expansion fees were ridiculous compared to the last round of expansion, so bettman loosened the rules to allow vegas and Seattle to be more competitive out of the gate.

 

[FrankSidebottom]

Agreed he was never good defensively. Where I disagree is that he’s anywhere near good now or the last few years. He’s average/neutral at best. Any forward with any kind of positive impact defensively isn’t going to be sporting a >70 OZs%.

He’s about average or slightly above now, but in this case that’s not because of his current deployment and OZ/DZ%. He’s pretty old and it’s hard to play in every situation at this point of his career when you have some nobodies to play defence instead of him but only him and Geno to deploy in the OZ

 

[Guttersniped]

When Ranger fans claim Kravtsov looked awful in his first NHL stint. If you go back and read the GDT’s he had the most first star votes of any player on the entire team through those 20 games, nearly every game he was top 3 in votes for our 3 stars. The GDT’s were full of posts saying how he was the best rookie they’ve ever seen play for the Rangers, how even Kovalev had his warts but Kravtsov is already a complete player and miles ahead of what Kovalev was, how they wish Kakko & Lafreniere looked like this.

At what point was he “miles ahead of what Kovalev was”?

 

[FrankSidebottom]

Crosby is better at defense than McDavid. I still would rate McDavid ahead of Crosby based on potential but if both of their careers ended today, you have to put Crosby ahead of McDavid.

I referred to their primes discussion, where one of the usual points is that young Crosby brought substantially better two-way play than the others. I find it revisionist

 

[Prairie Habs]

I mean, the rules allowed them to draft a team of 2nd/3rd liners, and second pairing (3/4) defenseman.

Never has the expansion draft allowed teams to protect so few players. The expansion fees were ridiculous compared to the last round of expansion, so bettman loosened the rules to allow vegas and Seattle to be more competitive out of the gate.

Teams were allowed to protect 7 forwards, 3 D, and 1 goalie. All of their 1st and 2nd year pros were automatically exempt and any pending UFAs were essentially exempt because you could just wait to sign them until free agency if they were willing to sign and didn't want to go to Vegas.

If you can't figure out a way to protect your top 6 forwards with at least 7 protections spots then what are you doing? They got 2/3 of their top line because Florida paid them smith to take marchessault (or maybe the other way around). Look at the D Anaheim protected over Theodore or the forwards CBJ protected over Karlsson. They were paid to take their eventual vezina winning goalie.

The rules weren't rigged in their favour, most NHL GMs just aren't that good at their job.

When people say “even Bobby Orr was traded “.
Never happened. He left as a free agent under unscrupulous circumstances that his crooked agent, Alan Eagleson, never informed him of.

I don't know I've ever heard that one, the one people always say is "even Wayne Gretzky was traded". Though, if you ask my oiler fan coworker he'll tell you Gretzky wasn't traded either and he retired at the end of the 1988 season, so who's to say?

 

[nowhereman]

Yes, he obviously wasn’t plain awful at his peak but he didn’t bring that much outside of offence as some people (in justifying him being above Jagr, McDavid, Ovechkin etc) claim he did.

Crosby was no Bob Gainey but, when comparing him to the players you mentioned, it certainly counts. They either had no defensive responsibilities or had periods of their career where they were outright liabilities. Crosby also played a grittier, more grinding style and that is also considered when talking about his all-around play.

So, for me it’s probably that Crosby was somehow well above average or even good defensively in his early-mid 20s. Yes, now he’s somewhat capable of decent two-way performance (but not like the top 10 in the Selke voting), but it wasn’t true in his prime

There's a reason that plenty of the most respected people in the sport, all of whom are more than "somewhat capable" of evaluating strong overall play, disagree with you. Hell, Scotty Bowman once said that Crosby was a Selke-caliber player.

Lol you are part of the problem.

The problem? The problem of more accurately assessing Crosby's overall play?

 

[Shareefruck]

This one could be in my head/maybe nobody actually has this misconception anymore, but I've always gotten the impression that Pavel Bure had the stereotype of a lazy primadonna Russian who never played defense and just hung around center to cherry-pick, and that was never remotely true. That center-ice-pass acceleration play was his bread and butter, but he was pretty responsible/hard-working defensively, and was always a solid forechecker and backchecker, at least in his Vancouver days.

I'd argue he was significantly better defensively than Ovechkin at any point in his career, including in his tenacious heat-seeking-missile days, which admittedly isn't really saying much.

 

[jigglysquishy]

Crosby is undergoing the same thing Mikita and Yzerman did. They were premier offensive players in their 20s and were considered strong to elite defensive players in their 30s.

In reality, they were all better defensively in their 20s than popularly perceived and worse defensively in their 30s than popularly perceived. All reputation changes perfectly coinciding with the decline in offensive ability. And all stem from misunderstanding usage in relation to defensive ability.